


Dreaming of a White Christmas

by Lady Divine Coldflash (fhartz91)



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Established Relationship, M/M, Romance, Tumblr: coldflashweek, With A Twist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-12
Updated: 2016-12-12
Packaged: 2018-09-08 02:48:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8827483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fhartz91/pseuds/Lady%20Divine%20Coldflash
Summary: Living in Sun City, CA (not by choice), Leonard and Barry prepare for Christmas. But the one thing that Barry wants this year is something that Len can't get for him ...... or so Barry thinks.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Written for ColdFlash Week 2016 for the prompt 'Domestic Life', with a secret prompt thrown in at the end (which I will include in the end notes - no peeking xD)

“A beautiful sight, we’re happy tonight, walking in a Winter Wonderland …” Len murmurs, plugging in cords and straightening lawn stakes. He’s only half paying attention to the words coming out of his mouth. He’s not what one would call a _carol_ man. He doesn’t want to hate himself forever for conforming to the norms of suburban splendor.

The life he has now is not a life he ever wanted. Even the things that make it better than he could have possibly dreamed, he would have considered liabilities back in the day. But after forty plus years of thieving, killing, and generally being a public menace, out here in this seven home cul-de-sac, flying farther under the radar than he’s ever flown, he’s free to raise his newly minted “normal” flag up the pole.

He’s not too thrilled with a lot of it, and on any given day, it can get kind of dull.

But he sure does love him some Christmas.

“Hey, Red!” he calls through the screen door. “Come out here and take a look. Tell me what you think.”

“In a minute,” Barry’s melancholy voice answers from inside the house. “I just have to …” It fades when Barry walks into the kitchen. They’ve been living in this house going on a year, and Barry still hasn’t figured out that his voice doesn’t carry from the kitchen to the front porch. That’s because they didn’t have that problem when they lived together in Barry’s loft in Central City. It had a flat, single-layer floor plan, with a clear view from the back bedroom to the front door. Nor in Len’s old, rundown safe house, which had only two rooms on the lower level and a single bedroom upstairs. It was easy to hear anyone from any room, no matter where they were inside or out, and ergo, completely defensible.

But this new house (two bedrooms, a guest room, a kitchen, a dining room, a den, and a living room), located in a gated community, has been a lot for them to get used to. It’s definitely bigger than any house Len has ever lived in … legally.

Len had to hand it to the federal government. The last guy that Len knew personally in the witness protection program ended up living in a hotel room for three-and-a-half years.

Someone high up in the chain of command pulled out all of the stops on this one.

Probably as a thank you to Barry for his years of service to the public as The Flash, even though Barry wasn’t the person who needed protecting. Len, who the government was willing to make disappear in exchange for going turncoat and providing them with some salient testimony, just happens to benefit from Barry’s heroism.

“I’m coming, I’m coming …”

Barry steps onto the front porch as Len plugs in the last of the animatronic snowmen.

“Well, whaddya think?” Len asks, nodding in thanks as Barry hands him a glass of lemonade. Barry looks from the sweaty brow of his husband to the decorations flooding their front lawn. Len has every inch of grass covered in lights, reindeer, elves, snowmen, something that looks like a cat playing with a Christmas ornament (though Barry would bet five bucks that it’s supposed to be a bear), and a pink flamingo wearing a scarf and a Santa hat.

The whole display is as gaudy as it is touching.

“Are you looking to divert every plane flying up the coast to our house?” Barry kids halfheartedly.

“It’s a helluva lot easier to loot them when they come straight to you,” Len kids back.

“I thought the Marshals said that we were supposed to maintain a low profile.”

“We are,” Len says. “Think of it as environmental camouflage. Every other house in the neighborhood looks like they got Christmas spirit vomited all over them. I just made sure ours matched. Except I did add a touch more class.”

“A-ha.” Barry looks from decoration to decoration, zeroing in on one in particular that might cast doubt on Len’s statement. “And you consider having Santa moon passersby _classy_?” He motions to a life-size Santa Claus flanking the front walk, back turned, face peeking over his shoulder, laughing, “Ho-ho-ho!” as he drops his drawers every half minute.

“It is where I come from, darlin’.” Len winks, winding an arm around Barry’s waist.

“Nice.” Barry chuckles. Not at all lighthearted, Barry’s laugh tolls heavy in Len’s chest. Barry reaches out for the closest snowman, trailing his fingertips down its white, faux snow surface.

“What’s up, Red? Why so blue?” Len snickers at his pun, hoping Barry will, too, but he doesn’t.

“I miss the snow,” he says.

“I know you do. But we’re leaving for Mammoth Mountains in a week,” Len reminds him, sotto voce, without moving his lips. “They’ll have snow to spare up there.” _Provided their armed security detail lets them get within five feet of it. God, what Len wouldn’t give to be able to swipe a snowmobile, throw Barry on the back of it, and shake the men in black for about an hour or so …_

“I know they will, it’s just …” Barry leans in to Len’s embrace “… I’m a Missouri boy. I miss waking up to snow, I miss watching it fall ...”

“Miss shoveling it out of your driveway? Miss spreading salt on the sidewalk? Miss scraping ice off your windshield?”

“You can try all you want, but you can’t make me hate ice, you know,” Barry says with a half-smile that has the tips of Len’s ears turning pink.

“I’m sorry, Red. I didn’t choose California. And Sun fucking City? I wouldn’t have brought you out to this Godforsaken desert in a million years. You know that.”

“I know. And we’re lucky that witness protection was willing to place you, all things considered.”

“I think they weren’t looking forward to locking horns with _the impossible_.” Len gives Barry a squeeze.

“I stopped being _the impossible_ when I agreed to be Mr. Leonard Snart.”

“Or, more accurately, Mr. Sam Lane,” Len corrects him. “And I actually think that that makes you _more_ than _the impossible_ , seeing as getting hitched was never a part of my master plan. Making me go off book is quite the feat, Mr. Lane.”

“Yeah,” Barry huffs, unamused. “Right.”

Len sighs. “Look, if you’re having second thoughts, even after the time we’ve invested, you can always …”

“No.” Barry turns in the crook of Len’s arm to look him in the eyes. “I’m not going back. I’m not traveling into the past and changing things. After all those attempts to save my parents that screwed everything else up? No. Not anymore. I’ve finally got something in my life that I don’t want to change.” He takes Len’s arms and holds on tight, as if even talking about changing the past might do it, destroy everything he’s worked so hard for. “Something that’s perfect the way it is. I’m not going to be the reason we don’t end up together.”

“But maybe it shouldn’t have come the way it did, with me gettin’ nabbed in the middle of that shit storm heist, then having my feet held over the fire so I wouldn’t spend the rest of my life rotting in a three by three cell twenty feet underground.”

“You think I would have let them take you there?” Barry asks, genuinely insulted.

“You’d have had to, Red, because I wouldn’t have let you turn yourself into a criminal. Not for me.”

“Well, if things hadn’t turned out that way, we couldn’t have had the rest of it,” Barry brings up. “A house, a legal marriage, a fresh start. I think that that, in the end, is a lot to be thankful for.” Barry kisses Len on the lips, just a short peck, but backed by the promise of more to come. “It’s definitely worth giving up a little cold weather.”

***

“Red! Red, come out here!”

“What’s going on? Did Ms. Parkin’s pit bull get out of her yard again?”

“No, no, it’s not that. There’s something I want you to see!”

After Len finished with the front yard, he’d had to make a run to the Home Depot for a few more extension cords … or so he said. Barry stayed home to finish with the decorations inside, and to get the presents that they would be taking to Mammoth (where they would get to see Joe, Iris, and Lisa for their thrice annual visit) wrapped. But twilight falls quickly during December in the desert, so just a few short hours later, the sky is dark.

Which means the lights on their front lawn, as tacky as some of them may be, must look phenomenal.

That’s what Barry thinks Len wants to show him as he makes his way through the house, possibly with the addition of a Mrs. Claus flashing her tits to match her lewd husband.

But the sight outside his front door is more marvelous, more spectacular, more breathtaking than anything he’s seen in a while.

Barry had thought their lawn was crowded before. He thought every inch had been covered.

It wasn’t.

But it is now - every section of green, every piece of tan bark, every light, every ornament - in an inch-thick layer of snow.

“What the…?” Barry stops on the porch, mouth agape, a frosty chill seeping through his thin t-shirt and racing up his spine.

“Huh? Huh?” Len asks with arms outstretched. “Whaddya think about it _now_?”

“What do I think … Len!?” Barry steps down off the porch, his feet making a satisfying crunch in the icy crust on the stairs as he leaves sparkly prints behind. “How did you …?”

“Did your man deliver, or did your man deliver?”

“I can’t … I can’t believe it,” Barry says, walking up to his husband, right into his arms.

“Do you like it?” Len asks, kissing Barry’s neck before he gets an answer.

“I …” Barry’s eyes sweep their yard, and then the yards of the houses close by, trying to come up with an explanation as to why theirs is covered in snow and no one else’s – snow that is still falling. A few calculations run through Barry’s brain, and his jaw drops. “Len! I thought you turned in _the gun_!”

Len rolls his eyes, remembering the fights they’d had in the beginning, the compromises made. Barry knew that if Len wanted to, he could sneak his cold gun, or some version of it, past the Marshals no problem. So Barry told him point blank - if he had to give up being The Flash, then the gun had to go. “I did, Red. Give me a little credit. I rented a machine. It’s over there.” Len gestures to a boxy, generator-looking monstrosity, spitting out snowflakes by the thousands.

“A-ha,” Barry says, shivering. “And that machine made those icicles hanging off the roof?” He looks pointedly at the gutters coated in a layer of ice.

“No, but as you can probably tell by your shivering, it is a rare 46 degrees outside right now,” Len says, taking off his parka and putting it around Barry’s shoulders. “I imagine that that plus the consistent cold from the machine can cause icicles to form.”

Barry pulls the parka around him. “You didn’t do well in physics, did you?”

“Straight-A student, babe.”

“Sure you were.”

“Don’t just stand there looking suspicious. What do you think?”

“I think …” Barry looks at the snow machine. He looks at the drifting flakes. He looks at the ground, and the mounds of snow forming, which, if that thing chugs all night long, might help produce a decent, if not tiny, snowman come morning. He sighs, a pure white fog of breath lifting into the air. Watching it float away towards the cloudless sky puts a smile on Barry’s face “… it’s perfect. Thank you. Thank you so much.”

“You’re welcome so much.” Len grabs Barry by the parka and pulls his husband in for a kiss, making good on that promise from earlier.

“Hey,” Barry whispers against Len’s mouth, “how about I go inside, whip us up some hot chocolate, and we drink it out here? Watch the snow fall … watch our Santa offend the neighbors …?”

“Do we have marshmallows?” Len asks before Barry can steal a kiss.

Barry laughs, and this time, it’s the laugh that Len’s been waiting all day to hear. “Yes, Len. We have marshmallows.”

“That sounds wonderful,” Len says. “And while you do that, I see a patch of green. I want to eliminate it.”

“Okay.” Barry pulls slowly out of his husband’s arms. Swimming in Len’s parka, he heads back to the house, gazing up the snow as it falls on his face.

“Oh, hey, speaking of Santie, while I was at the store, I saw this Mrs. Claus that …”

“No, Len,” Barry says, walking through the door and heading for the kitchen.

Len watches Barry, relaxed and happy for the first time all day, and he’s glad. He’s glad that he can do that for him … even if he’s not being entirely honest.

Len walks over to the patch of grass and crouches over it.

“How in the hell did I miss you?” he says, running his fingers through the vibrant, green blades. “Well, time for you to feel the chill.”

He had promised Barry that he would give up the gun, and he meant it. Maybe their relationship started with Len being full of lies and deceit, but Len stopped being that man a long time ago.

But old habits dies hard, especially when you discover something that could change everything.

He peeks up to make sure that Barry isn’t coming.

It only takes a second, but that second could ruin everything they have.

Len puts his hand in the center of the patch of grass, flat on the ground, and concentrates.

It tingles when it starts, like his arm’s falling asleep. That tingle becomes a prickling, less painful than a sting. It takes over completely, flowing down his arm from somewhere in his chest and gathering in the palm of his hand. His skin goes cold, so cold that he doesn’t feel it after a while.

He can bring it on in stages this way. It used to happen much faster in the beginning, when he couldn’t control it. But now he can slow it down, let it bleed through his cells and his molecules until the frost circulating through his body accumulates in his hand. He can shoot it like a laser, or expel it like a vapor, but either way, it has the temperature of liquid nitrogen.

He doesn’t know the extent of what it does, but he’s been able to freeze liquids, create weather, and cause hypothermia.

The kind that shatters human tissue like glass.

He never knew how to tell Barry that, after a while, he didn’t need the gun. He had entertained the thought that letting his powers slip might make Barry more interested in him as something other than a criminal, but he didn’t want to risk ending up in STAR Labs’ little habitrail.

Len has no clue how it happened. He wasn’t around when the particle accelerator went boom. He’d speculated that it might be a side-effect of using his gun, and that it would fade once he gave it up. But now that he doesn’t have that crutch anymore, it’s only gotten stronger.

He smiles to himself as he obliterates the last speck of green on their lawn, manipulating the individual ice crystals to match the rest of the grass around it.

What can he say? He’s nothing if not a perfectionist.

Truth be told, he’s ecstatic that Barry has no desire to go back into the past, or fix the timeline in any way. This hiding out in Sun City is just a stop gap as far as Len is concerned. This isn’t forever.

Barry, for one, deserves better.

With the two of them as metas, he can’t wait to see what the future holds.

 

**Author's Note:**

> The secret second prompt is Meta Len.


End file.
